This plugin hasnt been tested with the latest 3 major releases of WordPress. It may no longer be maintained or supported and may have compatibility issues when used with more recent versions of WordPress.

Check and Enable GZIP compression

Description

GZIP compression is bundling (zipping) pages on a web server before the page is sent to the visitor.
This saves bandwidth and therefore increases the loading speed of the page significantly.
The visitors’ web browser then automatically unzips the pages. This compressing and unzipping only takes a fraction of a second.

This plugin checks if your WordPress site has GZIP compression enabled. Every time you run this check, your domain name will be sent to http://checkgzipcompression.com. We won’t sent any other private information.

Screenshots

When enabled the plugin will tell you if GZIP is enabled.

The detail page will show you details about the GZIP compression state. And will make it possible to enable GZIP compression.

When GZIP compression is enabled, the plugin will tell you so.

You’ll receive an alert when GZIP is enabled.

Installation

Upload check-and-enable-gzip-compression.zip to the /wp-content/plugins/ directory

Activate the plugin through the ‘Plugins’ menu in WordPress

The plugin will let you know it GZIP is enabled,

When GZIP is not enabled, you can enabled it via the tools menu.

FAQ

Installation Instructions

Upload check-and-enable-gzip-compression.zip to the /wp-content/plugins/ directory

Activate the plugin through the ‘Plugins’ menu in WordPress

The plugin will let you know it GZIP is enabled,

When GZIP is not enabled, you can enabled it via the tools menu.

What is GZIP compression?

GZIP compression is bundling (zipping) pages on a web server before the page is sent to the visitor.
This saves bandwidth and therefore increases the loading speed of the page significantly.
The visitors’ web browser then automatically unzips the pages. This compressing and unzipping only takes a fraction of a second.

GZIP compression is recommended for all types of text files such as:
– HTML (.html) but also all types of dynamic HTML (such as extension .php, .aspx)
– Textfiles (extension .txt)
– CSS and Javascript (extensie .css and .js)
– Webservices, such as WSDL, REST and JSON

GZIP compression is not recommended for non-text files, such as graphical files and .zip files because it hardly saves space and can therefore increase the loading time.

Why is GZIP compression important?

GZIP compression saves 50% to 80% bandwidth and will therefore significantly increase the website’s loading speed.
The textfiles are compressed (zipped) on the web server after which the visitor’s web browser will automatically unzip the files. This compressing and unzipping only takes a fraction of a second without the end user noticing.

Just about all the large websites worldwide use GZIP compression. For and actual overview of GZIP usage nowadays please check our statistics page.

First report:
Initially, enabling GZIP compression with this plugin made my site take 1 second *longer* to load - both on first byte and "fully loaded."
Is it supposed to get better with time?? (As it is, I disabled the plugin as soon as I got back test results from https://gtmetrix.com/ and http://www.webpagetest.org/
Both tests yielded similar results.
I'm a bit frustrated because GZIP compression is enabled on the server, yet the tests say my site is not GZIP enabled. Now, even enabling with this plugin got similar results, except that load time takes 1 second longer.
This evening, GMetrix reported: Fully Loaded Time 6.9s Total Page Size 742KB with plugin enabled. Disabling plugin reduced time to 5.8 s.
webpagetest.org reported 6.228 s with plugin and 5.167s without plugin. So in each case, the savings was over 1 second for deactivating the plugin.
PS I notice that some of the 5-star ratings should be 1-star because they indicate that the plugin is not working.
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Next morning:
I found out that the "deactivation" of the plugin didn't actually "take."
When I re-tested my site (over 200,000 unique visitors a month with WordPress) this morning, I was surprised to see that the testing sites showed "gzip compression enabled." And, sure enough, WP showed it still enabled.
Turns out that was a good thing. This morning, average full-page load time is 3.5 seconds. But I've had that before in slow times, even wo gzip compression, so I'll reserve judgment till I can test it again at a busier time.
Take-away from my experience: It takes a while for the server to implement efficient gzip compression. So give it a bit of time.